Archive for the ‘Curation’ Category

Are you coming up short on ideas for your content strategy? Having a calendar of content about your company’s activities and products and services – press releases, white papers, case studies, articles, videos – helps to fill the pipeline. Still to maintain an active presence on social media channels requires having content daily or at least several times a week to keep followers engaged. Let’s face it; it’s not easy to be brilliant, witty, insightful and interesting all the time – for most of us anyway.

So just how do you keep content following to all your necessary content channels without causing yourself undo stress? You could hire a muse (run an ad on LinkedIn), get some cats (seemed to work for Hemingway) or you could repurpose existing content and you should. You can get a lot of mileage by taking your best content and turning it into something new and different and fresh to use on your various social channels.

The benefits of repurposing, in addition to getting more out of your content investment, are:

Reach a broader audience. People absorb information differently. Some are more visual and like images and charts and graphs; others are auditory learners and respond better to videos or podcasts. And then of course there are those of who like the written word. By repurposing your content, you can appeal to a wide range of followers. You can take a white paper and turn it into an Infographic or turn a video into a blog post. The same message in different formats attracts a wider audience.

Improve your SEO: You have more content assets to attract more traffic from those who are searching for the information you provide. You help to boost SEO by cross-linking your content. For example, you can create a blog post and encourage your visitors to check out a podcast that provides more information on the topic or includes an interview with an industry authority.

Explore new angles: As you repurpose your content, you may find a new angle. A blog post on how to implement a flexible work policy could spawn a white paper on creating office policies for remote workers.

Repurposing best practices

· Research: Understand your audience and what is important to them. Choose a topic that has several angles that you can repurpose into different content assets.

· Evergreen: As you are developing your content, aim for topics that are evergreen – will never become dated – to drive traffic to your site for a long time.

· Get creative: Determine the platforms you plan to use – blog, social media posts, YouTube or email campaigns – and then repurpose the content to get the maximum results from each.

· Add value: As you repurpose your content for different platforms, aim to add value each time.

Good luck repurposing. And if you still have problems coming up with fresh content, see if getting a cat inspires you.

In the world of content marketing, you hear a lot about content curation. Curation typically means acting as a curator or conservationist, preserving history for the future. In a digital sense curation can mean the preservation and management of digital assets. However, in the context of content marketing curation really means organizing and distilling relevant information so your readership gets the best of the best.

Effective content marketing is really about delivering meaningful, quality information that demonstrates your expertise and reinforces your brand value. Consider the exabytes of information that is being pushed out over Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and other inline forums. It’s too much data to sift through. Curation organizes the information in a way that makes it manageable, provides meaning, and focus. You want your message to be crisp, concise, and relevant. Curation helps cut through the clutter.

Beth Kanter, who advises non-profits about social media, recommends using the three S’s – Seek, Sense, Share – as part of your social media strategy. The same three S’s form the foundation of a good curation strategy:

Seek out the most relevant content for your audience.

Make sense of that content and help your audience interpret it. You can use blog content, annotations, comments, and other means to overlay relevant meaning on content.

Share the content through the channels that are most meaningful to your audience, sharing the data points that are most relevant.

When considering the process of content curation, like any marketing undertaking, you need to have a goal in mind, and then you can find topics that support your goal. Once you have a cadre of relevant topics, then you can apply the three S’s – seek out the topics, make sense of them for your audience, and share.

By using an organized, considered approach, you can cultivate vetted content from relevant sources, repackaged and reinterpreted so it’s more relevant to your message and your audience. Your content is of higher quality and greater value because you took the time and attention to distill it to make it relevant, focused, and meaningful.